Kae Verens has a recent blog post that looks at a method for helping to protect users from themselves when working with images - a method for handling ones incorrectly sized.

Every now and then, I get a call from a client who is puzzled why their site is running slow. I would look at their page and see an innocuous image inserted into a paragraph. When I examine the image, though, I see that the client has artificially resized the image using HTML. One recent example showed on-screen as a 300px-wide image. When I examined it, it was actually 3000px wide (approx).

The script looks through some HTML markup and, based on the sizes in the image tags, resizes the images appropriately. An example and the source are provided.

Etienne Kneuss has posted about a new part of the Standard PHP Library that creates arrays that are up to thirty percent faster than normal methods - SplFastArray.

Antony got the idea to implement a C-like array wrapper in SPL: SplFastArray. The main advantage of that class is performance, it's indeed faster than PHP arrays. How so? No free lunch: The speedup comes from the fact that non-numeric indexes are not allowed and that the array is of fixed size.

The code sample shows the setting of the size for the array (and changing it) with a var_dump of the output result. This method is always faster than normal arrays, it just varies how much from system to system (anywhere from ten to thirty percent).

DevShed has continued their series (here's part one) looking at the use of file uploading in your PHP scripts. They build on that foundation and add in some more useful features this time:

The initial script in the first tutorial of this series lacked some important features, such as the implementation of an effective error handling module and the ability to check the MIME type and size of the file being uploaded. In this second installment of the series, I'm going to improve the logic of the script from the first tutorial to provide it with the capacity to retrieve useful information concerning the entire file uploading process.

They look back at the previous tutorial to remind you of some of the concepts and then move on to show you how to get information about the file (like the MIME type, name and size of the uploaded file). The last page is just the full source code for the cut and pasters out there.

Ian Selby, working for a startup and building a lot of code up from scratch came across a problem - the upload of pretty large files via PHP:

I have found myself in a position where I am writing scripts that may need to upload fairly large files. My scripts were timing out, and I couldn't seem to figure out why. For the unitiated, there are some standard things that you usually do to both your php.ini and in your script in this situation [...] However, it turns out there are some other php.ini config variables that you may need to look at.

The "usual suspects" list includes changing the max_upload_size value and adjusting the script timeout. The other settings he mentions, though, are things like memory_limit, post_max_size and max_input_time to help increase the default times that PHP uses on most page executions.

In this tutorial on the LotsOfCode website, the author looks to help you create a feature common to several (including this one) websites out there - a tag cloud.

In this tutorial i am going to show you how to create a basic word / tag cloud using php. I am going to create a class based cloud, this is because it will be more convenient for people to adapt it on there own websites, if you don't know much about class based programming then click here to take a look at the class tutorial.

They pull the information from their "words array" (where words can be dynamically added to it) and use a percentage rating to base the CSS size for the data's span tag. The entire class listing is provided in one big chunk to make copy and paste easy.

A new tutorial has been posted to the WebCheatSheet.com website demonstrating a method for secure file uploads with PHP.

In spite of security issues that should be addressed before enabling file uploads, the actual mechanisms to allow this are straight forward. In this tutorial we will consider how to upload files to some directory on your Web server. We will also discuss security issues concerned with the file uploading.

They break it up into the two key parts - the HTML form and the PHP script that handles the resulting upload request. The "secure" part comes in with the validation of the upload. In this case, making sure it's a JPEG file, that its size is less than 350 KB, and that a file by that name doesn't already exist.

From the Inside Open Source blog (from APress) there comes a helpful tip for those working with Firefox and PHPMyAdmin on a lower resolution screen:

I'm currently working on an e-commerce project involving a relatively small number of database tables. However the clients table consists of 19 fields, making for difficult data review and debugging within PHPMyAdmin, even at 1280Ã-768 resolution.

The answer is simple, at least if you're using Firefox. Firefox offers three hotkeys for changing the text size, and resultingly, the amount of text you can see on one screen.

The keys for this easy little fix use the Control key and plus (larger), minus (smaller), and zero (return to default size).

DevShed is wrapping up their "Building Proxy Classes with PHP5" series today with this last tutorial about working with directory iterators and proxy classes.

Since in the first part of the series I showed you how to create a proxy class for processing simple XML strings, in this installment I'm going to teach you how to create a proxy object that can be used in conjunction with the "DirectoryIterator" class that comes with PHP 5.

They start with the definition of a proxy class, the base to start from, and improve its functionality through additional methods like getSize, getPath, and getTimeStamps (using the iterators). The complete the development by pulling the parts together and creating a final example that loops through a given path and displays various info about the directory/files inside (size, names, timestamp, etc).

The Zend Developer Zone has posted a new book review of a PHP-related offering from the APress Publishing company - Rob Richards's "Pro Pro PHP XML and Web Services".

Crack the front cover though and you'll soon discover that your new phone-book sized shield contains a lot of useful information. Let's dive into it a bit, shall we?

Cal talks about the contents of the book - all the way from the history of XML out to things like Web APIs, XML-RPC, and REST. He goes through, spotlighting some of the chapters along the way (including those on SimpleXML, syndication, and RSS/Atom formats). There's only one real complaint that Cal has about the book, one that's immediately evident to anyone that sees or holds the book in their hands - the sheer size and quantity of the material covered in the book (almost 1,000 pages).

As pointed out in this post on the Zend Developer Zone, the tag cloud can be a valuable tool to any site using tags for its articles/posts. They also mention a tutorial to help you build one.

Well, it's actually so simple it's not really a tutorial at all so much as a snippet with a bit of explanation. But I've had some people ask how it's done, so here's how I do it. I tried to go through and add some comments about what's happening.

The code pulls the information from a backend database and calculates out what size each of the items needs to be based on the max and min values set in the script.